Use of antidepressants and potential drug interactions in cancer patients treated at a hospital in the Southern Brazil

Justificativa e Objetivos: O câncer é uma doença crônico-degenerativa e seu diagnóstico muitas vezes está associado a sofrimento mental, dúvidas e inseguranças podendo desencadear o aparecimento de sintomas depressivos. Frequentemente, são necessárias medidas farmacológicas para o tratamento destes sintomas. Entretanto, pacientes oncológicos frequentemente utilizam vários medicamentos (polifarmácia) aumentando assim as chances de potencias interações medicamentosas (IM). O objetivo deste estudo foi avaliar o uso de antidepressivos nos pacientes em tratamento oncológico hospitalizados e as potenciais IM presentes nas prescrições destes pacientes. Métodos: Estudo transversal, prospectivo, descritivo e analítico realizado com pacientes oncológicos com idade ≥ 18 anos, internados em um hospital do sul do Brasil, e cientes de seu diagnóstico. As interações medicamentosas, maiores e contraindicadas, foram analisadas usando as bases de dados Micromedex® e Lexicomp®. Resultados: A amostra foi de 50 pacientes, 54% eram do gênero feminino e a média de idade foi 53,6 (±15,3) anos. Utilizavam medicamentos antidepressivos 42% dos pacientes, sendo o escitalopram (Inibidor Seletivo Recaptação Serotonina) o mais prescrito. Apresentaram algum tipo de potencial interação 90% dos pacientes e estas ocorreram com quaisquer medicamento prescrito ao tratamento. Dos pacientes que utilizavam antidepressivos, 62% apresentaram interações contraindicadas e todos apresentaram pelo menos um caso de interação maior. Os medicamentos mais relacionados a interações medicamentosas contraindicadas foram a dipirona e a metoclopramida. Conclusão: Os resultados deste estudo demonstraram um elevado número de IM contraindicadas envolvendo medicamentos antidepressivos. Neste contexto, verifica-se a importância do farmacêutico clínico na monitorização da farmacoterapia destes pacientes

Nausea: Current knowledge of mechanisms, measurement and clinical impact

AbstractNausea is a subjective sensation, which often acts as a signal that emesis is imminent. It is a widespread problem that occurs as a clinical sign of disease or as an adverse effect of a drug therapy or surgical procedure. The mechanisms of nausea are complex and the neural pathways are currently poorly understood. This review summarises the current knowledge of nausea mechanisms, the available animal models for nausea research and the anti-nausea properties of commercially available anti-emetic drugs. The review also presents subjective assessment and scoring of nausea. A better understanding of the underlying mechanisms of nausea might reveal potential clinically useful biomarkers for objective measurement of nausea in species of veterinary interest

The European Reference Genome Atlas: piloting a decentralised approach to equitable biodiversity genomics.

ABSTRACT: A global genome database of all of Earth’s species diversity could be a treasure trove of scientific discoveries. However, regardless of the major advances in genome sequencing technologies, only a tiny fraction of species have genomic information available. To contribute to a more complete planetary genomic database, scientists and institutions across the world have united under the Earth BioGenome Project (EBP), which plans to sequence and assemble high-quality reference genomes for all ∼1.5 million recognized eukaryotic species through a stepwise phased approach. As the initiative transitions into Phase II, where 150,000 species are to be sequenced in just four years, worldwide participation in the project will be fundamental to success. As the European node of the EBP, the European Reference Genome Atlas (ERGA) seeks to implement a new decentralised, accessible, equitable and inclusive model for producing high-quality reference genomes, which will inform EBP as it scales. To embark on this mission, ERGA launched a Pilot Project to establish a network across Europe to develop and test the first infrastructure of its kind for the coordinated and distributed reference genome production on 98 European eukaryotic species from sample providers across 33 European countries. Here we outline the process and challenges faced during the development of a pilot infrastructure for the production of reference genome resources, and explore the effectiveness of this approach in terms of high-quality reference genome production, considering also equity and inclusion. The outcomes and lessons learned during this pilot provide a solid foundation for ERGA while offering key learnings to other transnational and national genomic resource projects.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

One hundred priority questions for advancing seagrass conservation in Europe

17 pages, 2 figures.-- Open AccessSeagrass meadows provide numerous ecosystem services including biodiversity, coastal protection, and carbon sequestration. In Europe, seagrasses can be found in shallow sheltered waters along coastlines, in estuaries & lagoons, and around islands, but their distribution has declined. Factors such as poor water quality, coastal modification, mechanical damage, overfishing, land-sea interactions, climate change and disease have reduced the coverage of Europe’s seagrasses necessitating their recovery. Research, monitoring and conservation efforts on seagrass ecosystems in Europe are mostly uncoordinated and biased towards certain species and regions, resulting in inadequate delivery of critical information for their management. Here, we aim to identify the 100 priority questions, that if addressed would strongly advance seagrass monitoring, research and conservation in Europe. Using a Delphi method, researchers, practitioners, and policymakers with seagrass experience from across Europe and with diverse seagrass expertise participated in the process that involved the formulation of research questions, a voting process and an online workshop to identify the final list of the 100 questions. The final list of questions covers areas across nine themes: Biodiversity & Ecology; Ecosystem services; Blue carbon; Fishery support; Drivers, Threats, Resilience & Response; Monitoring & Assessment; Conservation & Restoration; Governance, Policy & Management; and Communication. Answering these questions will fill current knowledge gaps and place European seagrass onto a positive trajectory of recoveryThis project was initiated and carried out under the EuroSea project using funding from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Oragnisation. Additional support was from the UK Natural Environment Research Council RESOW grant to Swansea University (NE/V016385/1). The EuroSea project is funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 862626. Thanks to Toste Tanhua and Emma Heslop for their supporting this process. Thanks are due to FCT/MCTES for the financial support to CESAM (UIDB/50017/2020 + UIDP/50017/2020 + LA/P/0094/2020), through PT national funds. Financial support from Fundacao para a Ciencia e a Technologia was also provided through the research contract to A.I. Sousa (CEECIND/00962/2017)Peer reviewe

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Inquiry into an unknown musical practice: an example of learning through project and investigation

Abstract - The music pedagogy department at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Lyon has built a training programme based on project and inquiry, inspired by the theories of John Dewey and Louis Legrand. The students are asked to investigate a musical practice that they are not familiar with before. They meet musicians, perform with them, they conduct interviews, prepare pedagogical workshops, read documentation, and animate a seminar. The idea is that they through this process become able to raise new questions derived from action experiences. The following article unfolds the theoretical foundations of this project, and describes how it is implemented by showing an example of students who have investigated bèlè, which is a music and dance form from Martinique. This ‘inquiry’ and project constitutes a challenge for the students that changes their understanding of what music and what learning music are. Conducting an investigation allows students to take a global view of the musical issues – an approach that differ from how most of them usually focus mostly on ‘musical material’. They identify the multiplicity of conditions for the emergence of a musical practice, which is essential since they have to encourage and accompany new practices as pedagogues in the futures

The music performance student as researching artist? Perspectives on studentcentredness in higher music education

Abstract - In this chapter, we present a status after the AEC Learning and Teaching Working Group’s first year of activities. Since February 2018, the AEC Working Group has been examining, investigating and discussing issues of learning and teaching in music performance education under the lead of LATIMPE, the Platform for Learning and Teaching in Music Performance Education (www. latimpe.eu), which is jointly operated by AEC and CEMPE. This has been done through a dialectical researching process going back and forth between practice and analysis, always striving to keep the balance between a know-how gained through empirical experience and a knowledge based on research findings in order to ensure a structured approach to how to deal with the topic in a scholarly appropriate way. The starting point of investigation were practices that were familiar to members of the group. Key learning perspectives that have arisen from this analysis are student ownership, students’ responsibility and freedom, a safe environment, opportunities to experiment, projects that evoke the ‘learning muscle’ of students and projects that build on students’ strengths. In the chapter, we discuss some basic questions, such as: What should students learn? Who and what decides on what they should learn? How to encourage students to take ownership of their learning agenda? To what extend and how can all this be reflected in the curriculum? How can an institution ensure the viability of individual and diverse ways of learning? We end with an argument in favour of seeing the student as a researching artist, as this conceptualise an active, artistic student with professional agency, who is curious, and takes responsibility for his or her learning process. LATIMPE is pursuing this process of collecting practices